A couple weeks ago, I hosted Distributed Camp. A virtual conference held over the last weekend in May and featured presentations and workshops from IPFS, Beaker Browser/Hypercore Protocol, WebTorrrent, and I2P.

I did this with zero funds and zero prior history in creating or organizing virtual events.

Since then, I’ve had a few folks ask about how to do one of these events on their own. Here is my recap, a few specific recommendations, and a few thoughts on what could be improved.

Firstly, I will call out that I, a white cishet man in tech, stand on privilege mountain. When I started organizing, I was also working for a well respected technology company and had not only the benefit of that company name (although I was incredibly clear that I was not involving them in the event and it was not for their benefit), but also made very useful connections through interactions at the company.

So when I said I was putting together an event, despite having ZERO experience, I was taken absolutely seriously.

I was also super lucky to have made friends in a couple other projects as well via our mutual interest in the future of the Internet and a user-owned / user primacy view of how the Internet should be.

When organizing the event, I looked to other virtual events to see what I could replicate, what I could borrow, and what I could improve. Ultimately I owe a LOT to !!Con and would recommend that anyone looking to do an event online, talk to them first.

I was also VERY aware at how quickly things can go sideways IRL and even faster when events are pseudonymous and virtual. I chose to do two things right away:

1. Publish a Code of Conduct and be outrageously clear that there would no be tolerance for bad behavior.
2. Have users register and send invites to the camp Discord via email.

By restricting the flow of users into the event, I also restricted the audience fairly severely. I wanted to be certain that if nobody else stepped up to moderate, that I would be able to balance that versus MC’ing the talks. The counter-balance being that the talks were all broadcast over Twitch. So if a talk picked up, they could handle the load, but I don’t have to worry about having ruining the community.

I’ll note this in the ‘things to do differently section’, but I believe I was too afraid of the troll factor and would probably be more open in the future.

Let’s talk tech

Video

Zoom for small to medium groups Streamlabs OBS connected to YouTube/Twitch xyz streaming platform for large presentations (only if you have a beefy machine like a gaming rig)

Community / Chat

Discord

Website

Digital Ocean droplet with a simple Nginx config Hugo for static site content management

Alternatives

Brave Together / Jitsi instead of Zoom Discourse for Community instead of Discord IRC for chat instead of Discord Beaker Browser / IPFS / I2P instead of Digital Ocean

Emphasize your ‘Hallway Track’

No matter what you do for your event, the absolute most thought should go into how you are going to foster human relationships. !!Con executed this P E R F E C T L Y.

Have ‘side rooms’ for conversations to occur beyond your main topics. Consider having some form of automated spontaneous & random meetings as well. Julia Evans open sourced her Discord bot. A fork or #theme version of virus.cafe would also serve this purpose well.

Options and Tradeoffs

So far, the technologies I have listed are highly optimized for a low budget virtual event.

Real World - If you are going to attempt an event in the real world, you’ll also need to consider venue, lodging for guests & speakers, and travel.

Registration - It may seem peculiar, but you don’t HAVE to have registration. Especially if you are not looking for sponsors. Registration does help with managing attendee communications, moderating, and with gauging interest. One downside of having a free event is that attendees will often take the effort for granted and not show up.

Analytics - Much like registration, it can help with gauging interest. It can also help uncover gaps in the flow where you may not be providing the right actions for your users to follow-through. However, most solutions require third-party observers. In a privacy-sensitive culture, this is not acceptable. One solution would be to self-host Matomo, but that will drive up operational cost.

Pre-recorded Talks - It may seem odd, but this worked amazingly well at !!Con and pretty well at Distributed Camp too. By having the speaker pre-record their message, this alleviates last-second technical issues and allows the speaker to fully engage with the audience as they are bringing up points in chat.

There are of course many other options not covered, but those were the ones which stood out most to me.

Improvements

Distributed Camp was an incredible success no matter how you look at it. The ROI vs operational cost is unrivaled, the participation was healthy, and speakers and attendees alike overwhelmingly said they would attend again in the future, many also indicated they would buy a ticket or donate to improve the camp as well!

That said, there are a few things I would do differently for the next major camp event :

Diversity - While we opened with a female speaker, the presenters were, by and large white. Yes, distributed tech is a niche of a niche technology, but if we talk about empowering users, we’d better have more than one variety at the table.

Schedule - I would give a MUCH longer lead-time on planning. The camp itself was a reaction to a global event.

Sponsors - I would push harder to acquire sponsors. I really wanted to have some special speakers to help provide an lens of anthropology, design, and society.

Marketing - I would put much more effort into getting the word out across various channels.

More ways to participate - As mentioned at the top of the post, I was perhaps overly concerned with trolls. I would consider leaving the Discord open then only locking after an issue has presented itself. That said, what we have now is a good foundation of folks who understand the mores and folkways of Distributed Camp.

Closing

Hopefully this provided a good overview. There are certainly much more specific topics as regards network, A/V, etc.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!